The first phase of the project concentrates on the scholar and professional reader Gabriel Harvey – a near contemporary of the Elizabethan poet-courtier Edmund Spenser – who left behind a uniquely large corpus of personal manuscript annotations in early printed books. The breadth and range of these annotations have proved an invaluable source for historians, although their study has been significantly hampered by constraints of time, geographical distance and other resource limitations placed on scholars by the dispersal of Harvey’s collection across libraries throughout Britain, Europe, and north America.

The Archaeology of Reading will reformulate a significant number of these scattered volumes within a curated collection of digitized early modern books annotated by several major figures such as Harvey and John Dee, offering users a range of opportunities to explore and mine their notes for data, match up marginalia from one book to related notes found in another, create links to other book citations, and reconstruct reading strategies by stitching together various intellectual patchworks and thematic consistencies. These functions will be enhanced by the project team’s commitment to making both printed text and manuscript annotations available both in the languages in which they originally appear in the sources, as well as through English translation. These manuscript notes will be fully transcribed and searchable in a machine-readable form.

This is Version 2 of the Archaeology of Reading site, updated in September 2016 to include an operational viewer and contextual documents.